Great Web tools for shopping

SALLY DENEEN Cutting Corners

December 23, 2007|SALLY DENEEN

If you're in the market to buy a pricey item like an iPod or a big-screen TV, consider these comparison-shopping tools: PriceSpider.com and Bountii.com.

Let's say you're interested in an iPod touch (8 gigabytes). I normally go to Google.com and type in an item's name to glance at a page of results. In this way, I saw last week that the price for this iPod ranged from $282.94 to $365.75 (identical to PriceGrabber.com's results). That's expedient. But no search engine seems to find every low price, so when you have that nagging concern that you're not getting the best price, it's good to check elsewhere.

An advantage of going to Bountii, where the lowest price seen for that iPod was $282.99, is it can quickly tell you how much it'll cost to ship the item. I find it less time-consuming and clunky than a competing comparison-shopping tool, TheFind .com, which returned lots of results to wade through (but maybe some people appreciate that).

At PriceSpider.com I saw the lowest base price for that iPod: $278.76 (at PC Superstore), plus a nifty little chart showing prices for the product are on a downward trend. PriceSpider says it fetches prices in real time so you see the latest price and it lists every online store it finds, unlike sites that show products from stores that pay them. Another advantage of PriceSpider is you can sleep on a proposed purchase before buying; arrange to get an e-mail if a price falls below what you hope to pay.

Open Christmas Day: Short on gifts? You won't strike out. Among places that will be open: Blockbuster, Walgreens, 24-hour locations of CVS Pharmacy (such as 1 N. Federal Highway, Fort Lauderdale; 954-524-0500), and traditionally major movie theaters.

Via your home computer, you can buy and immediately print half-off gift certificates to eateries via Restaurant.com and SouthFlorida Dines.com. The latter also sells gift certificates via phone at 866-379-3463, though not in time for this holiday. Amazon.com says its electronic gift cards arrive within hours and can be sent as an e-mail or an e-card.

Cutting Corners appears on Sundays. E-mail: Cutcorner@aol.com. Record a message at 954-356-4759.